


what the water gave me

by missrainydays



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Jack Robinson is very difficult to define, Poetic Garbage, Porn Without Plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-03
Updated: 2015-02-03
Packaged: 2018-03-10 07:25:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3281957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missrainydays/pseuds/missrainydays
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Surrendering was not something that Detective Inspector Jack Robinson was accustomed to doing, but the ocean made him an offer he couldn't refuse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what the water gave me

She was the ocean.

She crashed on the rocky beaches of their lives, again and again, never wavering, always beckoning him to wade into the waves. _The water’s fine,_ she’d say, smiling, swirling and skipping amongst the salt and sand. _Just cool your feet, for a moment, darling, rest your tired mind._

She was infinite, and beautiful, and a force no man could hope to tame. 

She collected weary travelers, offering them safe passage, allowing them to float on her waves into the horizon. She protected them from her storms, shielded them from the rising tides that swelled within her. She was a force, of that he had no doubt, but she was a force that you couldn’t help but wish to submit to. 

He was the sun. 

Predictable, sometimes harsh, sometimes shrouded by clouds of sadness. Even so, he rose and fell each day with a sense of purpose, knowing that he must give. He knew his role and he performed it well, and he did his best to shine where he was most needed. 

He had never known what it was like to give up, to surrender, to lay down his sunbeams and declare, exhausted: I cannot.

Not until they had the sea.

They circled each other, never touching. They were two unstoppable forces unaccustomed to facing immovable objects. And yet, he rose above her, every morning. He hovered just near enough to warm her, and then slipped away, leaving her to froth on the cold rocks, alone. She did not waver, did not linger on his absence, and instead continued to rock, slow and steady, through her days. 

He enjoyed watching her, enchanted by the way she wanted him but did not need, did not want to take too much, when so many things had been taken from him already. The ocean asked for nothing, only was, content to live and die with the tides. 

And yet, and yet. 

How many months had it been? How many days had he been pulled towards her, captivated by her shimmering depths, reflecting him back, only to sink below the horizon to sulk? He tried to tell himself that he did not need, either, did not need her, did not need her strength to make it home each night. He promised himself that he would fight and fight and not surrender to the tide as it pulled him closer and closer and closer.

And yet…

On any day, on any given month, not yesterday and not yet tomorrow, it didn’t matter which, he finds himself standing at her door again, shielding his eyes from the sun. He wants to warm her, today, to watch as she reflects the best parts of him back, and hides the dark parts with a quip and a sly smile. 

She answers the door with a crash, her eyes alight with laughter. 

“Oh, Jack…” she says, breathless, her eyes as blue as the ocean.

She lets him into her parlor and spirits a glass of booze into his hands. She is curious as to why he is here; their last case had wrapped days ago, Melbourne was safe and quiet from murderers, for the time. He half expects to find another man in her home, leaning against the mantle or lounging on her sofa. But she is alone, so curiously alone, as though she has been expecting him all along. She has a curious way of making men feel like they are the only men she’s ever seen, and he appreciates the pretense.

The smell of her French perfume swirls around him like small whirlpools and intoxicates him. His whiskey sits untouched and suddenly, he doesn’t need it to feel its warm buzz.

She doesn’t ask him what he’s doing there, in the middle of the afternoon, nor does she expect him to explain himself. Instead, she just peers at him over the rim of her glass, curious. 

“Lets go to the beach,” he says suddenly. “Too beautiful to stay inside.” He isn’t sure whether he’s talking about her or the weather.

She tilts her head and smiles at him. Half an hour later, they are speeding down the road-not in the Hispano, but in his own motorcar- the view of the crisp saltwater of Port Philip filling the windshield. 

The roll of the waves comes in and out like a heartbeat, and he eases the car onto the sand.

There is a moment of hesitation, and then, gloriously, she kicks off her shoes and runs into the surf. The small, barefoot tracks of her feet are wiped clean, leaving nothing but pristine sand in their wake. She is the ocean, water here unto forever. She drags him away from the shore and deeper into the drink. And dear God, does he want to drown.

The past and present overlap here at once and are swallowed, until dying is the same as not yet being born.

He can feel the cool spray of the ocean on his face; he feels the salt sting his lips. She is immune to the saltwater, laughing in the foam, all sun-kissed skin and windswept hair.

She is lying back now, onto the sand, the froth of the waves covering her to her knees. She unbuttons her shirt, and he wonders why she does it- it is not that hot or that humid. She lays back, her shirt ripples like the ocean does, two things both caught in the wind. No one is out here, it is just the two of them, and he is glad for it, glad that no one can bear witness to his suicide.

A stray shell amuses him and when he stoops for it, to place it safely in his pocket for later study, the ocean steals it away first. The sea is not like the river that was his marriage, which had its fits but generally behaved; the ocean is its own, and it draws you in, chews you up, and spits you out. It does not take from you, but it does not stop for you, either.

She is the ocean.

They return to her home in St. Kilda just as the sun slips away, warm summer twilight filling the spaces between them. He will not fight her any longer; will not hide beneath the horizon from her waves. She invites him in for a nightcap and he does not refuse, only follows her into her home. He is sinking, slowly, beneath the surf, drowning in Phryne Fisher. And now, finally, he doesn’t fight. He never liked shining, anyway.

He kisses her first, tastes the salt on her lips. She kisses back. He can’t remember ever feeling this way, not even in the giddy excitement of his wedding night. There is a strange tenderness to surrendering, he supposes. She must sense that he’s waxing poetic, considering her depths, and she nips at his neck. 

She is leading him by the hand to her bedroom, now, up the stairs and down the hall and he breathes slow, careful not to drown in the smell of her, not yet. She is rising up and crashing down, waves breaking on the edges of his heart. He wonders, distantly, if she enjoys it.

They enter her _boudoir_ together, and she closes the door behind them. The room is dark and flooded with moonlight, and she is illuminated. 

He wonders if the moonbeams will cleanse them of their sins, or if the ocean has already done it. 

Now she kisses him, more urgently, and he can feel the wet heat that clings to her skin. He touches her, everywhere, all the places he secretly admired from across crowded rooms or over the rim of her crystal tumblers. Her neck, each small bone in her chest, the underside of her slim arms, the place where her waist curves into hip. Each spot tastes different, slick from saltwater and anticipation. She moans his name, and the sound of her voice races down his spine and coils, burning, in his belly. 

She is running her long fingers along the inside of his jacket, pushing it off his shoulders and into a sad, forgotten heap on the floor. Each button is freed from its confines and each brace relieved of its position and soon, he is standing naked before her, although strangely, he doesn’t feel vulnerable.

He allows her to touch him, now, each scar from shrapnel and too much booze and words unsaid. He wonders if she can see his regrets written just beneath his skin. 

He is watching her too intently, is too content to feel her breath on his face and suddenly, she’s sinking, creeping away like a retreating tide, down to her knees. And oh God, her mouth is on him, and oh God, what is she doing-

“Bed.” She commands, and he obeys.

She straddles him, still fully dressed, and plants seeds of tiny kisses into his neck. He can’t fathom what she’s doing with her hands, can only feel the nerves flaring and misfiring as they race from his groin to his heart and back again. 

She stops, and he slurs her name, his own voice foreign to him, and she laughs. Her dress is getting pulled over her head, along with her underthings, and now she’s naked too, her skin soft and pale and infinite like the ocean. She slides one pale thigh between his, aligning them, and his world pulls into sharp focus.

He stops her.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, suddenly unsure, leaning back and leaving a cold void between them. 

“Kiss me,” he says, and it’s like a prayer. He doesn’t want it to be over too fast, it’s been so long, and he is going to soon be cold and dead. He needs it to just last a little longer, so that he can have no regrets. “Just kiss me.”

She smiles, and obliges him, her nipples dragging across his chest to the rhythm of her breathing. The salty air in her lungs passes between them, and he inhales her until he is filled to bursting. They kiss and it is timeless, seconds or minutes or hours, until, urgently, he needs her more than the oxygen they share. 

He flips her, and her eyes are wide. He wants to succumb to her, to allow her to pull him beneath her depths, but a man cannot be faulted for swimming, futilely, against the sinking tide. She lies on her back, her legs folded between them, the source of his demise, and he wonders if she can tell that he loves her, because she’s smiling. She pulls him down, closing the gap between them, and he tells her.

She doesn’t say it back, but he didn’t expect her to.

He pushes himself inside her, water filling his nose and mouth, and her eyes roll back, and she is moaning, a siren song, and suddenly love is just a word that means so much less than the sound of his name on her lips and the way her leg curls around his back. Love is just a four-letter word that can’t possibly describe the way she feels, wet and hot and saline around him. It can’t add meaning to her, can’t define something as endless as the ocean. It means so much less than sitting across from her in his office or the sight of her kneeling beside a corpse at a crime scene. Love is not a marriage or a diamond ring or a full house of children or even a promise of forever- it is here, and now, and the final breath shared between them. She could take a thousand lovers and it would not diminish the way her eyes pierce him now, the way she fills his lungs, and he kisses her and kisses her and kisses her. He kisses her until he feels her hips jerk and her legs spasm and she screams his name for the entire world to hear and once she’s spent, he allows himself to sink.

They never share a bed again. He dove into the ocean, and sucked the water into his chest, and now she fancies herself a murderer for drowning him.

Weeks later, she is sitting in his office, speaking low and fast about what might motivate a banker to strangle his partner with a belt in a butcher shop, and he smiles at the memory of her naked and parted beneath him. They don’t talk about it- they don’t need to- because it’s still there, in the brush of their fingertips as he hands her a glass or while he leans his forehead against the cool shower and just… remembers. 

He doesn’t need her to love him because he has accepted his fate, filled his pockets with stones and waded into the surf. There is so much more between them, too much to allow for silly dalliances like love. 

And they will always share the sea.

**Author's Note:**

> I meant to be working on my other fic, a little party never killed nobody, but I sortof slipped and let this happen, instead. I had originally intended for this to be much more graphic but I guess I'm not really at that point in my fanfic writing career (I just can't get myself to write words like "cock" or "cunt" and not laugh out loud). 
> 
> If you are a fan of Florence and the Machine, the title and themes of drowning, suicide, and surrendering to the depths of the ocean will be familiar to you. The title of this fanfic shares a title with her song, What the Water Gave Me, which I highly suggest you listen to, because it's fantastic. I also stole some themes from her other songs, Swimming, Never Let Me Go, and Falling.


End file.
